I take to take time to talk about the way that current dot and buff system works. I’ve redone this a few times to try to simply the text significantly so people in general can follow with out being confused or having high levels of game design knowledge.
DoTs
[Current System] In general Dots work like the following
- Individual dots are applied to a collective Gui Icon
- Individual dots have their own duration which are internally tracked (seen through the single gui icon), but externally hidden (players can see them)
- Individual dots have their own damage rates based on conditions (buffs etc) at the time of cast
[New System]
All Debuffs refresh a collective, single gui icon.
All Debuffs applied by any player will refresh that debuff for the total of the duration
All Debuffs now have set durations Longest being poison, and shortest being tourment.
All Debuffs follow a logic: The longer the duration the weaker the dot, but higher the utility, the shorter the duration the higher the damage, but the lower the utility.
All Debuffs are now capped. Damage at 20 Stacks, utility at 10.
This means that if a raid consists of 2 people, they can push the cap of 30 stacks. That means that each stack will always deal a set amount of damage for each player. Adding more of the condition classes will not add more stacks, but will retain that dps rate. This means the max potential damage being reaches by stacking condition classes are met faster, but are more limited. This means stacking condition classes will invalidate the point of stacking condition damage, there by validating Power.
The Math
Lets look at current rates
At current, the average damage of poison is about 175 dps.
At current, the average damage of bleeding is about 395 dps.
This means that
At current, the max potential dps for 30 stacks for poison is around 5235 Dps
At current, the max potential dps for 30 stacks for bleeding is around 11893 Dps
This means that
If 10 people are in raid, the total Dps from poison is 52,350 DPS
If 10 people are in raid, the total Dps from Bleeding is 118,933 DPS
The New Rates
At current the new rates will change this application to the following
@ the average damage of poison is about 175 dps.
the average damage of bleeding is about 395 dps.
This means that
At current, the max potential dps for 20 stacks for poison is around 3490 Dps
At current, the max potential dps for 20 stacks for bleeding is around 7928 Dps
This means that
If 10 people are in raid, the total Dps from poison is 34,901 DPS
If 10 people are in raid, the total Dps from Bleeding is 79,289 DPS
This means the total drop off of dots will be around
Poison: 17450 Dps
Bleeding: 39644 Dps
The effects in PvE
Assuming that a Necromancer is running Dots, this means he will increase in DPS due to the fact that he will not longer be experiencing drop off.
This reason for this is because at current the necromancer does not always uphold the current Max-Dps rates. For example
Lets say a necro does his lowest dot 100% of the time, his median dot 50% of the time, and his highest dot 10% of the time. (if 200 is lowest, and 2000 is highest)
This means his dots will look something like (over 20 ticks)
200,200,200,200,200,200,200,200,200,200,400,400,400,400,400,400,400,400,600,600
This means the potential Damage over 20 seconds is 6000 damage
With the new system the stacks will stack twice as fast.
200,200,200,200,400,400,400,400,400,400,400,400,400,400,400,400,400,400,600,600
This means the new system will provide a potential of 7600 damage. This is a 1600 damage increase.
This means the personal potential dps of a player will be increased by around 35% of current value, which the over all raid dps will drop around 57094 dps (due to the limit of the dots being applied by stacking condi).
In return this should validate the power related builds like that of ranger, gs meser, and warrior (In both pve and pvp).
Hopefully i dident screw up any Head/Paper math here, At this point i want to tackle the buffs.
In a similar way that the debuffs work, i want to create a buffing system. The buffs will follow the following principles
- All Buffs refresh the duration of existing buff types. So if player a applies might, and player b applies it, then might will refresh its duration for all effected targets.
- The highest buff takes priority for the refresh.
What this will do is encourage buff stacking by refresh timers, which will improve up times, this will primarily be a pve oriented buff, but will help pvp support be encourage significantly. This means buff spam stacking (to gain lots of variations of might) will not be viable anymore, but the up time of having two support will benefit both pve and pvp.
Lastly, I want to tough on a new idea for toughness.
I had as well as other players in the guild really feel like toughness is being overly used by all specs, and classes, and is its not effecting condition damage is problematic.
for this reason, I think applying a new mechanical operation to toughness may be really neat and effective and provide it a unique way of addressing condi.
The idea basically is to cause toughness to fully negate damage through the reduction of time. The math would work something like this
Current : (1s)200, (2s)200, (3s)200 ,(4s)200,(5s)200 (Ticks, Each tick represents a second)
New @ 50% Toughness you gain 50% Reduction in duration of condition effects when its applied to a toon. So if poison ticks 1 second for 5 seconds (Above example) Then it will look like this
(1s)200, (2s),250, (3s)0 damage, and drop off (negating the ticks for 4 and 5 second interval).
This will make toughness really powerful against the new dot system by negating large amounts of the condi damage, but still making condi a pressure for tanks. Hopefully this will encourage more bunker builds, but still make them viable.
Recap and Understanding the concepts behind all of this.
Application of dots at a consistent rate buffs. This Improves the over all Dps of Condition damage based builds.
Limitation of the max amount of players is limited to the amount of stacks, each person should get 10 stacks, so if you set the cap at 20, you should have a minimum of 2 people. however, I believe that you should count +1 for the cap, so 2 for a cap of 10 stacks, 3 for 20, and so forth. This reason for this is because the third person will play a “support refresh role” additionally what needs to be brought to mind is the reminder that you only refresh stacks that are part of your class, so stacking more condition classes is viable, just not the same class/build. This should help make all classes, specs in more demand.
Limitation of Stacks Limits and highly disencourages 10x condition necromancer in a raid. Additionally, the limitation of stacks at 20, prevents more then 2 condition damage being viable in pvp, forcing some spread to other classes.
Refreshing of Buffs by teammates helps improve uptime, and over all raid damage negating a lot of the loss of the condition changes to pve, and highly motivating the player base to build multiple support times.
But limiting the stacking system of buffs you reduce the amount of abuse that comes from buff spam in pvp, giving it more balance.
Lastly, it should be noted
The duration of buffs should be reduced slightly, to make it difficult. The value of this is not known it will require some testing (try a 20% reduction to start). The idea basically is to make it highly important to have two or more supports that set up a chain of some time to keep buffs going continuously. This should be fairly simple with the right mix of builds (Thus increasing pet viability in raids of various types, and subsequently ranger desirability). This should help empower ranger-archer based builds (as opposed to druid specific specs).
Additionally, the debuffs of classes should be reworked so that each class is only applying a max of 2 buff times (maybe three in some cases). This will help people
to want to mix classes to validate more dot additions, subsequently improve raid/pvp build variations.
With this being said the way that debuffs work should be changed to the following
Burning – fastest damage over the shortest period of time
Bleeding – Moderate damage over moderate durations
Poison – Lower damage over longer durations, with healing debuff
Torment – highest dps over shortest durations
Invulnerability – Faster stacking power. (2% Per a stack)
Examples
Burning – 600 damage over 2 seconds (300dps)
Torment – 1600 over 5 seconds (320dps)
Bleeding – 2000 damage over 8 seconds (250dps)
Poison – 4000 damage over 12 seconds (333dps)
Lets see what you guys say from here.
(edited by Anari.2137)
I don’t know what are you smoking but seriously, do you really think giving mesmer 60% damage reduction is good? Bulwark gyro, Rise! and dwarf passive trait are kittened enough with their 50%.
It does not have to be 60% Dr. But i think 30% is merited at the minimum.
It changes the strategy of meser to suit what it currently is, which is to focus
the clones. Meser is really squish and needs more livability in heavy combat.
Power build is just shy of the damage it needs to be viable dps wise, but livability has a long way to go, so the dr would help the non-chrono related builds.
Condition damage at the moment ignores toughness, I want to change that so that it now reduces the damage by 50% of what the 100% value of toughness is for Power.
In other words, If you deal 100 damage direct (power) and have 50% Damage reduction, you will receive 50 damage. However, if you deal 100 Damage condition damage, and you have 50% Damage reduction (from toughness) you will receive 100 damage. So i want to change this so that if you have 100 condition damage, and 50% Damage reduction, you will take (a total of 25% Damage in this case) 75 damage instead of 100, there by improve the viability of toughness, and improving bunker builds.
As for necromancers,
They are strong because of the lifebar, the improvements to chill etc put them in a competitive position, however with the addition of the second life bar that push them over. In short, they deal more damage then other classes and have way more life. The latter is the issue, not the fore. If you nerf their chill and their damage, you will take away their power to threaten rival teams (as they would basically just become annoying condi-tanks). So removing the Hp bar and replacing it with a sort of “ok, your about to die but you have 3 seconds to counter that” or “get kicked to stop the shroud” provides a lot of counter play with out significantly hurting the class (like a damage nerf would).
Completely gut necromancers unique mechanic, and it’s only, rather meagre defence, instead of reversing the unnecessary buffs they got after Season 1? How about removing the buffs they shouldn’t have got, and maybe toning down chill a bit?
All i read from this is “i want to rofl stomp people”.
you could get a unique mechanic by just saying “when you hit 0 hp, your become immune to damage for 3 seconds” and than limit it to a 40 second cooldown or something.
This is both good and bad, but in general application complexity is massively more negative than positive.
Only because of human error on the devs’ parts. Complexity has the potential to the genre quite amazing. Maybe devs need a certain AI to help aid with balancing?
While I’m for necro nerfs 5 seconds is way too much, maybe two seconds instead?
While I agree there may be some way to change complexity (in theory) to be simple, that would really negate the purpose of complexity to start with, wouldn’kitten
I think the problem is player(s) think that you need “complexity” to have choices, and that is far from the truth. In general, the only people i EVER see advocate for complexity are the ones that have some insistent need to “1 shot noobs” which is in no way shape or “good” for the game.
That being said, Even if it was possibly to display complexity in a simplistic way, there is no need to try to do that when you can just water down the game and make it simple to begin with.
Hello Guys, I wanted to give some feedback on game balance specifically when it comes to the Player vs Player Combat, but i want to also include some more advanced discussion about the overall design philosophy as its important to the topic.
<b>Design positions</b>
As far it seems, Guild wars two is running off a balance concept with intentional design of complexity. What this means, is the game has intentionally been designed with large amounts of complexity. This is both good and bad, but in general application complexity is massively more negative than positive. More hardcore players will not agree with this, but this is largely due to the fact that hardcore players make up much smaller amount of the population than casual players.
When it comes to pvp meta, especially involving that meta that is at the lower tiers (Amber, Emerald, Sapphire) there is a large amount of issue with this, and even if there was not the issue you would still have a fairly or even massively large stepping stone from that meta to end game.
Lastly, Complexity itself is the result of imbalance in the game (Especially extreme versions of that). For example, it is from learn A + B * C = Broken Build (D) That you arrive to these positions; however if everyone knows you have a+b*c, and all builds are equal to the same output, you will have balance. Unfortunately, that means everyone is using the same builds unless the developer wish to great large amounts of variations. That being said however, even in that application all power would be relative to other aspects and so subsequently would be “dull” or “boring”. Basically that means that the game would be like world of warcraft with the various builds (but only potentially more of them).
Now that being said however, with lots of builds you have another type of complexity, and that is “meta related complexity”, so your down to changing the complexity from learning builds to learning meta, and while that in general is better is not the best way to ultimately do it (Which is why wow’s balance is so exceptional).
It has caught my ears that the developer of gw2 is taking the opinions of players on how to balance the game, and this is largely a very broken position. You cannot obtain any reasonable amount of balance off this principle so i am here to help (with my experience) on resolving these issues.
Now on to the topic at hand.
It seems to me that there is some massive instability in the current meta.This is as follows.
- Tanks (or bunker) Builds seem to be very inconsistent. In low end meta they are exceptional, and in high end meta they are useless (or near to).
- Necromancers Second life bar is a serious balance issue, and needs to be addressed.
-Some classes are at significant disadvantages in upper end meta, like warriors and thiefs.
-Some other classes are forced to play very limited options and specs, Like rangers and guardians.
- Some mechanics in game are overly powerful, Like trap spamming (guardian).
- The game should never be balanced on a secondary stat, The game needs to be reverted back to power building. (i’d like to know more why this was changed).
<strong>Changes/Strong>
From what i can gather, a large amount of the issues seem to be largely mechanically based (that means the initial equations, or operation).
<strong>Condition Damage</strong>
Condition damage issues can be resolved by a change in the base way the conditions work. This would be to limit conditions so that they have a max application. Setting this than at the level of say 10, would really inhibit and disencourage double class builds.
Additionally at current the build up time , and the reward for dot damage is insufficient to be competitive on some classes (Like Elementalist). For this reason 10 stacks should be converted to having equal damage to the current 20. This will help move some new builds into play like earth elementalist, or bleed ranger.
Next on the topic of condition damage, and how it is displayed and works,
The current set up of the system is counter-intuitive. All dots should be on a single timer, and should simply act as an additional stack, (or if at max) or a refresh to the timer.
The current mechanics of the GUI display of the dot effect makes dots feel unrewarding, wonky in their optional, unpredictable at being able to upkeep, and so forth. This is unneeded levels of complexity, and a highly unprofessional design aspect for the system.
With regards to Conditional related effects and expertise new runes should be added with various types of combinations like “Vitality(900), Condition (1200), Expertise(900)”.
Finally, When it comes to condition related effects, the duration needs to be improved to various degree’s and should be something like
Weakness – 10% Improved Damage, 8-10 Seconds
Tourment, Chill – High Damage, 4-6 Seconds
Poison – 18-22 Seconds
Bleeding – 14-18 Seconds
Etc
<strong>On the topic of Toughness</strong>
At current the toughness is overly rated for all classes. The current meta is encouraging players to ignore their base stats in favor of this stat. While this should be a viable option, it should however not be a necessity for the builds. For this reason either classes should more easily acquire interval based (Ie, on and then off for some time) “Protection” effects or all classes should by default get around 20% Damage reduction.
If this change is implemented it should improve the livability of the classes enough to swap off these builds.
Additionally, Toughness needs to reduce income condition damage by around 65% of the base damage (as opposed to direct damages 100%) This would help validate “bunkering” Builds in the meta.
<strong>On to Class Mechanics</strong>
Rangers are in need of some serious love when it comes to pets. A lot of the pets are heavily invalidated due to bristle backs over powered damage. The Other popular pet provide a significant advantage also, leaving the others far in their dust.
I think a good solution to this is to modify the base attack of all pet types, into some cool effects like
Cats – Bleeding
Spiders – Poison
Bears – Tanking/agro (pve oriented)
Hyena – Buffs
Dragonkin – Damage (Ranged oriented-Direct Burst Damage)
Canine – Attack Speed (Melee Oriented Direct damage)
Pigs – Gizmo’s And Invisibility Detection.
Additionally when it comes to ranger, The Short bow needs to be improved (Dot oriented).
Ranger spirit abilities seem to be almost useless, i recommend a change to passive stat increases like “Poison damage on hit applied” and “bleed on hit” “Pet damage” and “range damage increase”. this should synergism well with the class talents.
Necromancer.
The second life bar of this class needs to have one of the following changes.
- Removed, 3 seconds of immune to damage when hitting 0 hit instead (can heal during this period)[recommended]
- A Long duration cast time ( 5 seconds)
- Removed, Replaced with a buff + 20% HP (passive). Rework Regeneration (heal) that necro’s have to drain durance in replacement of life (low cd).
Warriors
When it comes to warriors, they simple just need their hp amount tuned, say another 30% hp from the equation?
Mesmer
A new passive that is attached to clones. For each clone active you gain 20% Damage reduction. This application should allow power mesmer builds to be viable again, and encourage hp related talents etc to keep them active. Additionally a slight reduction to number 4 ability for Greatsword would be merrited to help burst with this class (-15% of current cd)
Elementalist
Cd of overlord on aura’s is reduced to 5 seconds.
Cast time of reflect (Warhorn # 4 ability) removed, now instant cast.
- Ability (Secpture) Of lightning improved damage significantly (to have burst or pvp).
Fire (#3) time to fall is reduced by 50% of current value.
This seems to be it for feedback now, I’ll see what we have going in replies. Thanks for the read.
(edited by Anari.2137)
I have given thought to this.
I think a menu option with toggle on and off option to be whispered by “Trial accounts” should be given, and defaulted on. This will prevent the gold sellers from messaging people, and will force them to either pay money or get out. It wont get rid of them (im sure they will find a work around) but it should get rid of a lot of the issues.
I am looking for a group of people (5-10) to help us clear our guild expidition, we are a guild with a few 80s that are never really on at the same time. If you can get 5-10 friends and help us clear it (or clear it for us) Please contact me.
Anari talar – Tarnished coast